by Zenith Brown
“Is there any conceivable reason why you shouldn’t, Mrs. Latham?”
“You sound exactly like Irene,” I retorted. “The iron claw in the velvet glove sort of thing.”
The atmosphere around us was definitely electric for a moment. I heard that dog growl—very faintly but quite unmistakably—and then I heard his tail thump the walk, and the atmosphere cleared. Dr. Birdsong took his pipe and his oilskin pouch out of his pocket. Even without seeing him clearly I knew he had relaxed into his usual urbane self again.
“Don’t you know, Mrs. Latham, that murder is one of the most dangerous games men play?” he asked casually. “And the dangerous thing about it is that it’s only the first step that’s hard? After that hump is cleared, a second one is pretty simple?”
“You mean,” I said—and I suppose it was terribly foolish—“that it would be pretty simple for you to murder me?”
He jerked back as if I’d lashed him across the face, and I could feel the shaggy hair bristling along that immense dog’s back. I was quite literally stunned. I meant chiefly to be—not exactly arch, but I suppose that sort of thing. And I was not only stunned, I was a little frightened. It wouldn’t have surprised me in the least just then to have felt a knife between a couple of strategic ribs.
He recovered even before the dog—and much before I did. In fact, I haven’t entirely recovered yet.
“I suppose it’s Rick you’re thinking of,” he said quietly.
I stammered. “I . . . I didn’t mean—”
“Perhaps you’ll tell me what makes you think I killed Rick,” he interrupted coolly. “Sit down, boy.”
The boy sat down, but I could see those eyes fixed on me. If only I had sense enough, ever, to mind my own business, I thought. Those three glass nodules filched frim the State Road Commission’s sign were insignificant beside the two red gleaming nodules there that were ordinarily milky-blue and mild.
“Well, I don’t know, actually,” I said feebly. “It’s just that looking back on it, it seemed odd that (a) you barged in at precisely the psychological moment, and that (b) after you left the scene of the crime a very important clue had left it too, and that (c) you went enormously out of your way to explain to me that without that very clue it would be impossible for anybody to shoot Rick, and that (d) it was you who pointed out to all and sundry that the tree was down and the road to Romney blocked so that Major Tillyard couldn’t possibly have got back here, and incidentally established a similar alibi for yourself.—Though you haven’t, of course, mentioned that.”
“Since it would have been so simple to upset,” he said quietly. “I had a car, even if Tillyard didn’t, and even if the walk in from the tree wouldn’t have been the least effort for my seven-league boots—which I happened so conveniently to be wearing last night—Tillyard’s car was this side of the tree, with the keys even more conveniently in the ignition.”
“I thought of that too,” I said—a little angry at his tone, though I’m sure a man has a right to resent being accused of murder, whether he did it or didn’t.
“I’m sure you did,” he said coolly. “And what about the fact that I’ve admitted hunting game with a bow and arrow?”
“That too,” I said, just as coolly.
“And my motive for killing Rick? Had you thought of that?”
“No. I’d not. Apart from the fact that you claim to have a sense of justice. But that doesn’t prove you didn’t have one.”
“Certainly not. Just as the bit of yellow string caught in the splintered wood of the arrow that killed Rick doesn’t prove that Mara used her glove to wipe off . . . even if the string does come from a blood-stained glove that does belong to her.”
I caught my breath sharply. The scene on the terrace, at breakfast, before Irene and I found Rick’s body, flashed into my mind . . . Mara coming in from her early canter, with muddy jodhpurs and muddy jodhpur boots, her shirt open at the neck, pale and excited, dropping a single string glove on the end of the table by her crop.
“You can’t seriously—” I began.
He interrupted me so curtly that I couldn’t believe we’d ever had an amusing friendly conversation. “Look, Mrs. Latham. Perhaps some day the simple fact will occur to you that there’s not an animal in creation that—goaded far enough, and cruelly enough—won’t turn on its tormentor and destroy it or be destroyed itself. Mara is a passionate, high-spirited human animal.”
When he stopped short it was as if I’d had a blinding glare taken from my face. He went on, more casually, less intensely concerned.
“If you’d seen Mara as I saw her less than ten minutes ago, you’d know what I mean. I don’t know what’s happened to her, or when; but I don’t think murder would be hard for her now. If last night she’d met Rick out there in the dark . . .”
He shrugged his big shoulders. I was aware suddenly of the heavy sweet fragrance of Latakia, and knew he was opening his oilskin pouch and burying his pipe bowl in the moist dark shreds. My mind raced desperately, trying to fit what he’d said into the pattern I knew. What could have happened, less than ten minutes before? Was it just a continuation of the scene in the hall, which he perhaps still knew nothing about? Could Irene possibly have seen her children in the library and instead of making peace with them, forged new bitterness? Did it mean that Mara now knew that while Dan was free to marry Cheryl, she was to be sent abroad to forget Alan Keane? Or had Irene reneged on Dan and Cheryl too?
Dr. Birdsong’s voice interrupted my feeble surmises.
“Normal people don’t kill without pretty overpowering cause, Mrs. Latham: love, hate, revenge, gain, fear. Rick’s murderer was motivated, I haven’t a doubt, by one of those five springs of human behavior. And Rick’s sins were visited on a chosen few—personally, I didn’t happen to be one of them.”
In the pale moon glow above the boxwood I could see a faint smile light his eyes, and an ironic twist at the corner of his hard mouth. “Now if it had been Irene—”
He stopped utterly short and whirled around, and I caught at his arm with a terrified gasp. Splitting the silver silence of the night came the most appalling high-pitched scream of terror that I ever hope in all my life to hear. I stood there, clutching at him, petrified with fright . . . and I could just vaguely hear myself, hardly realizing what I was saying, my voice chilled and shaking:
“That . . . that’s not a peacock . . .”
Before the words were out of my mouth it came again, unmistakably human, too awful to be heard.
Dr. Birdsong had jerked his arm away and was running at top speed toward the house, his long legs clearing the distance to the portico in a fraction of an instant. I ran after him, desperately. He tore at the bolted screen. It was too firmly hooked, any grip he could get on it too small, for him to rip it open; the door behind it was closed so that he couldn’t kick it in. He tore a case knife out of his breeches pocket and slashed through the copper wire . . . just as that dreadful cry rose again, and then stopped quite abruptly, held for eternity at its highest note by the crack of a pistol shot.
Dr. Birdsong thrust his hand through the door and tore it open. I dashed after him, sick with fear, not daring to think, my heart pounding in my aching throat. He stopped for an instant at the hyphen door, and sprang forward again. I looked down there, when I got up to the door. A pair of dark legs and a white coat were stretched on the floor under an overturned chair.
“It’s Fellowes Dunthorne!” I thought as I forced myself forward. Then I saw it wasn’t. It was Yarborough. He lay motionless and limp, the blood oozing from a gash in his white head.
Dr. Birdsong was standing framed in the library door, the room dark beyond him. I crept up to him and looked past. On the grass carpet not five feet from where I was standing, glistening in the light from the game room, lay three bright pebbles. My eyes moved beyond them, slowly, as if weighted with lead, and then closed . . . but with dreadful futility. Printed in fire on my retina was still the image of Irene Winthrop lying acr
oss the hearth, unbearably motionless.
I felt Dr. Birdsong move, and opened my eyes as I heard the switch beside the door click, flooding the room with light. Irene still lay there, inert. But there was no arrow in her throat . . . just the mark made by the bullet that had gone through her heart, and in the room the heavy odor of cordite, grotesquely mingling with the smell of roses and spice pinks.
Dr. Birdsong’s eyes were fixed not on Irene but on the floor, and as I followed them I saw a pearl-handled pistol lying on the thick grass carpet. It was Alan Keane’s, the one he had held to his own forehead, the one that somebody had stolen from my white beaded bag in the top drawer of the mahogany dresser.
And that was not all. Backed motionless against the garden door, not three feet from that gun, was Mara Winthrop. Her dark eyes fixed on that pistol were so wide with horror that I thought she could never in all the world close them in peace again.
23
I have only the most confused picture of what went on after that. I know that as Mara slipped unconscious to the floor Dr. Birdsong cleared the room in two strides, picked her up and laid her on the sofa between the windows. And almost immediately—it seemed to me almost as if they’d been crowding the wings for some monstrous grand finale—everyone was there: Major Tillyard first, groping, desperately shaken, toward the figure huddled silently on the hearth. And Dr. Birdsong was back, keeping him from her, holding off all the others—Natalie, Mr. Dunthorne, the maid Anna and the old cook, and Dan, in the hyphen door, and in the garden door Mrs. Jellyby and the stable boy Jim and Mr. Keane.
He turned to me, his voice crackling. “Get Purcell on the phone.—Mrs. Jellyby, have Jim put Yarborough in the sofa and give him some aromatic spirits—he’s in the hephen. Dan, you carry Mara upstairs and come back here. Mrs. Latham, you keep her quiet till I come up. The rest of you go in the living room and stay there.”
There wasn’t a sound or movement of protest as we all faded quietly out to do as we were told. No one dreamed of questioning his right to give orders, and if they had, I thought grotesquely, there was that huge crazy dog of his, ready to herd us the way they do the marked sheep in the trials in Hyde Park, his eyes, milk-blue now, alive with intelligence. And oddly it was Mara he chose—or perhaps was ordered, I’m sure I wouldn’t know—to go along with. I saw him at Dan’s heels as he carried the child up the old pine stairs. I saw Dan’s face too, and I couldn’t bear to look at it. I felt the scalding tears pouring down my face as I cranked the telephone and asked the operator for Mr. Purcell’s house.
“He isn’t there, ma’am,” she said. “If you want him, he just went in the Fountain bar. Shall I ring him there?”
“Please do,” I said. “And tell him to come out to Romney as quickly as he can. Tell him Dr. Birdsong wants him at once.”
I hung up the receiver and wiped my face, and went up the third floor stairs to Mara’s dormered chintz-hung room. Dan had laid her on the reeded applewood fourposter with its dotted swiss curtains and bright spread, which I saw had, with a kind of bitter irony, the old double wedding ring design the mountaineers in Tennessee use so much. He was standing beside her, rubbing her limp pale little hand, his lips pressed together, his head bent forward on his chest. The dog was sitting a little away, a dejected mirror of the man in front of him.
I crossed the room to the bed and stood there, saying nothing because there was nothing at all I could say that Dan didn’t already know without my saying it. He turned away a moment. Then he said, so huskily that I could hardly hear him, “How did she get the gun?”
“It was in my bag with the letters,” I said. “They’re gone too.”
“Then she found out he was trying to kill himself?”
I nodded. And that, of course, would be what had happened when Dr. Birdsong had seen her, less than ten minutes before.
He looked steadily at me. “We’ve got to keep it to ourselves, Grace. Nobody knows it but you and me and Alan.—Unless his fingerprints are on it. She wouldn’t have tried to keep them off. Poor little devil.”
His choked voice was almost inaudible.
He swung around abruptly and started for the door.
“I’ll get hold of that gun.”
“You let that gun alone!” I said sharply.
“And let those bastards hang her?” he asked, with dull fury.
“Better they than you,” I retorted. “They’ll never hang her anyway, and you can’t tell what they might do to you. And by the way, where’s Cheryl?”
He looked blank, almost stupid.
“The girl with eyes like hyacinths,” I said. “Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten her already.”
He stared dumbly at me, turned and strode out. It may be entirely my disordered fancy, and heaven knows there was reason enough for it to be disordered, but I could almost swear that that impossible dog was laughing. But when I looked at him more closely he was sober again, his fringed eyes fixed anxiously on the bed.
Mara’s lips were parted, and from them, inaudible if the dog hadn’t pointed it out to me, came a low poignant moan, growing stronger and more heartbreaking momentarily as she toiled up out of the blessed abyss of unconsciousness. And suddenly there broke from her the most awful cry: “Mother! Alan, Alan!”
My blood froze as I grasped her struggling body and held it frantically. I’d never in my life thought I’d get to the all-time low of pleading with an animal, but I actually heard myself crying, “Oh, won’t you get Dr. Birdsong?”
He got up immediately and trotted to the door, and I heard a sharp high-pitched bark, and another, and almost immediately there was the sound of running feet and Dr. Birdsong burst through the door.
“You’ve got to do something for her!” I said. “She’ll go out of her mind—or I will! I simply can’t bear it!”
He strode to the bathroom and came back in a minute drying his hands, his cuffs turned back. I watched his great sensitive fingers swab the pale flesh of her arm, sink the long needle and pump two c. c. of temporary oblivion into her writhing little body. It wasn’t entirely the hypodermic that quieted her so quickly; it was also the healing power that flowed out of his rugged hands as he held her wrists in one of them, the other resting gently on her brow. We stood there on either side of the bed, waiting, until her breath came quietly again and her body relaxed gradually against the bright quilt. When I looked up from the pale mask of her pointed elfin little face his eyes, very level and compelling, were fixed on mine.
“Can you trust me now, Mrs. Latham?” he asked quietly.
I nodded.
“Were those glass buttons what you meant?”
I nodded again.
“There were three of them on the range that morning. There are six missing from the crossroad sign at the lane entrance on the county road. So there was a point-of-aim for whoever shot Rick. I thought you must know it.”
He ignored that.
“And perhaps for somebody who was planning to shoot Irene,” he said. “Until someone else barged in with the gun.”
Neither of us let our eyes move to the girl on the bed.
“I hadn’t thought of that,” I said.
“Who did you expect to see when you came around the house, Mrs. Latham?” he asked abruptly. “And what was it that was gone?”
“I . . . can’t tell you,” I said. “It’s not that I don’t trust you—believe me. It’s just that it’s not my secret.”
His gaze never left my face. I tried to meet it as unflinchingly as I could. Everything in me cried out that the best thing would be to tell him all I knew, from the very beginning—trust him implicitly. But there was Mara lying between us, as we stood facing each other across the white-curtained bed. And downstairs somewhere was Dan, who’d forgotten for her even his own loss of the girl with eyes like faded hyacinths, the Holy Grail he’d spent two age-long years in finding only to lose again.
“I’m sorry!” I whispered.
He nodded. It had never occurred to me he’d be able
to understand, but he seemed to.
“Will you stay here a while with her?” he said. “There’s nobody but Mrs. Jellyby to stand by, and I’m afraid her heart won’t do all these stairs.”
“I’ll stay,” I said.
He let his fingers rest a moment on Mara’s pulse, picked up a cotton blanket from the old chest at the foot of the bed and laid it over her. I watched him go toward the door, and took one impulsive step forward to call him back and tell him everything I had to tell. I caught myself just as he turned, gave me a very odd smile and went on out.
I stood there, quite still, for a long time. It wasn’t only that smile that upset me. It was too intangible to mean much. It was the fact that the dog trotted out with him without so much as a backward glance or a wag of his tail. It gave me the uneasy feeling that I’d been neatly labeled—like Mrs. Jellyby’s seeds—and then quietly deposited in the finished business basket. I tried to think back what it was I’d been saying.
I was still trying to, without the least success, when I heard a soft step on the stairs and then on the landing, and looked up sharply. Natalie Lane was standing in the door. She glanced around the room and took a step inside.
“Do you mind if I close this?” she asked.
I shook my head, though I did mind, really. I wanted to hear Mr. Purcell when he came, and I couldn’t with the door closed.
She closed the door, came on in and looked around again.
“This is a nice room,” she said calmly. “Did you ever see the horrible place Cheryl had? Full of the most god-awful late Empire monstrosities—perfectly mammoth things. It’s a wonder she stuck it as long as she did. I would have taken an axe to them.”
I looked at her, thinking she needn’t have closed the door, if this was what she’d come up to say, especially now that Irene was dead. At the same time there floated through my mind a little scene at lunch at the Sulgrave Club one day in the early spring. Irene, looking too lovely in a pillbox hat made entirely of delphinium flowers enveloped in a veil with the most extravagant pink chenille dots all over it, had shrugged her slim elegant shoulders with that amused despair of hers and said, “It’s simply that you’ve got to be brought up with old things to appreciate them. Poor child, she can’t help it, I suppose—it was silly of me to put so many of my best pieces in her room.”